The Prime Meridian!

At 1443 (2:43 p.m.) today April 5, we crossed the equator (0 degrees North/South) at the Prime Meridian (0 degrees East/West). This is a featureless point off the west coast of Africa and has no significance except for geeky-types like me. Whee!!!! One minute it's fall, the next spring. Actually it's pretty hot and feels like summer on both sides of both imaginary lines. We arrive in Ghana tomorrow morning.

'Round the Cape

After an uneventful passage around the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa, we approached the city of Capetown, South Africa on a clear, crisp March morning. We were just past the equinox and fall was in the air. The foredeck was crowded as dawn broke and we were treated to the distinctive skyline of Capetown with Table Mountain towering above the city, dominating the skyline. It was truly beautiful and I was psyched to get my boots on the trail to climb the sucker. (My inner peak bagger from my grad school days sometimes comes to visit my soul) Hillary said that we climb to get to the top, but really that was just a flip response to a question that if you have to ask it, you cannot comprehend the answer.

Capetown from sea

Following the requisite organized chaos that is customs clearance for a thousand plus people, we were released to go play ashore. I had no responsibilities in this port so I was free to join a group of staff and faculty who were looking to stretch our legs and tour the town a bit. The port facility is right downtown and we were able to get onto busy streets immediately and see what was what. The first shock was to have cars stop at the crosswalks - very different from China, Vietnam, Burma, and pretty much every single place we had visited including Hawaii. People seemed friendly and we had a pleasant stroll through streets where everyone spoke English and all the street signs were in good repair and easily followed. It was quite a treat.

We visited a local market and eventually found a street cafe where we enjoyed a beverage or two and a big basket of chips. "I don't want chips, I want french fries" was a line from one of our group. "Ahhh… 'chips' are 'french fries' here" was the reply. You have to speak English here, not American.

The following day was the big draw for me in this port - we were set to climb Table Mountain. We had a small group of six set to do the  climb and the weather was a bit of a worry. The day previous had been very windy and the mountain had beed quite cloudy by mid-day. This is a common weather pattern for this time of year and we were hoping to get some views from the top of the mountain. When I awoke I was pleased to see that the day had dawned clear and calm. We eagerly boarded the bus and were quickly brought around the city to the beautiful Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens on the outskirts of the city. We were met there by our hiking guide Binny and another guide Frank who was set to meet us at the top of the mountain. Binny cheerfully organized our little troop and we set out across the gardens to the start of the trail. Table Mountain pretty much rises straight up out of the ground with very little in the way of foothills. We went from a casual stroll to a hike worthy of New Hampshire - straight up. Our track was up the colorfully named "Skeleton Gorge". Switchbacks were few and sections of the trail were so steep that ladders had been installed in order to get us past the sheer rock faces. It was a bit strenuous, but our group moved well and after a couple of hours we topped out and took a snack break.

Our route up Table Monntain

I expected the top of a mountain called "Table" to be pretty flat, so I was surprised to be greeted by small peaks and valleys covered with thick scrub. It looked all the world like the San Raphael Swell in Southern Utah with hardy vegetation covering sand and rock. The top of the mountain is interspersed with five reservoirs built in the 19th century to supply water to the city. The upper basins were dry, but the lower ones still held water kept back by stoneworks hand-hewn from the surrounding rock. We could still see the scars on the sides of rocks were the stone had been broken out and shaped for the dam and stone pathways around the water basins. We spent several hours walking around and across the top of the mountainside and stopped on the far side to gaze down at the broad Atlantic Ocean far below us. There wasn't a breath of wind and the air was warm - it was hard to look across the water and realize that the next stop was Antarctica.

We continued our long loop around the mountain and in a couple of hours we reached our lodging for the night - a stone cabin maintained by the South African version of the National Park Service. I expected some sort of rustic building with rough accommodations and was pleasantly surprised to find bedrooms with comforters and china plates, silverware and even wineglasses for our evening meal. Very cush - not at all what you would find in an American national park to be sure. Our group spent the remainder of the afternoon relaxing with a bit of napping and reading all that was on the agenda. As the sun sank low over the horizon, a few of us trooped out to a fantastic overlook and enjoyed the amazing sunset. Turning around, we were created by the rising

Moonrise - our cabin is on the left

full moon for a second amazing celestial spectacle. As the moon continued to rise, the lights of the city came up far below and we relaxed with a glass of wine and good conversation. We had a very nice group. Dinner was an amazing affair with steak, Tandori chicken, local sausage and roasted vegetables. Frank is an amazing cook and there was more food than we knew what to do with. The cabin had running water, but no electricity so our dinner was a lazy affair with great conversation and stories of South Africa from our generous hosts.

Sometime in the middle of the night I was awoken by the sound of the wind which had returned with force. I got up just before sunrise and bundled up and climbed up on some rocks above the cabin to greet the sun. I found a nice lee and huddled down to watch the sun rise. Clouds were pouring over the mountain and cascading into the valley below. The lights of the city stood out as the valley slowly began to fill with clouds. The sunrise was spectacular and by the time I got back down I found breakfast waiting for me. After a lovely meal, we packed up and headed out. Our original plan was to hike across the top of the mountain and take the commercial cable car back down to the city. The winds made that plan impossible, so we went to Plan B which was to walk back down. Binny's extensive knowledge of the area gave us a different way down and we were able to enjoy another aspect of the mountain and very different weather. I learned from a Hurricane Island Outward Bound instructor: "There's no such thing as bad weather, just different kinds of good weather".

Sunrise

The winds were whipping and the clouds were pouring over the top of the mountain - definitely a different kind of good weather from the previous day. We looped around through dry mountain vegetation and eventually passed down into thicker trees and occasional running water. We ended back where we began in the beautiful botanical gardens in bright sunshine. Looking up, we could see the clouds racing across the sky. The winds had not abated and indeed would continue to blow for the entire rest of our visit. We had hit on the only clear calm day in the entire week - good fortune indeed.

The following day four of us took a rental car south along the scenic coastline towards Cape Point - the end of the Cape of Good Hope. This is not the absolute southernmost point of Africa, but it is the one cited by mariners as they pass from Indian to Atlantic and back again. The weather was windy and threatening rain, but the drive south stayed clear and sunny. We enjoyed fantastic views and I got to practice my driving on the left skills honed in Kenya and Grenada. It's so much easier with an automatic transmission. Finding reverse in a hurry when you've got an elephant in the road is much more of a challenge than the smooth, wide roads of South Africa.

The view from Cape Point

We eventually reached the National Park and got to the lighthouse at the end of the road. There was a Visitor's Center and nice restaurant where we had a lovely meal that included my favorite beverage - Stoney! Stoney is an African Ginger Beer (non-alcoholic) that I first grew to love when I used to go to Kenya all the time. I was reintroduced to it last summer when Jim and I went back to Kimana and I was pleased to see it here as well. I'm currently sailing with a couple of six packs to enjoy for the rest of our voyage. While we were down on the Cape, I took a short hike with Ariana down the sea cliffs to a beach to collect a bit of sand for my beach sand collection. The

For the nautically minded

trail was a boardwalk that turned into a steep set of stairs down to the beach. Fun going down, a bit less fun going back up. Our timing was perfect and as we set down to eat lunch, the threatening rain came in and we enjoyed the smokey coastline from the safety of our Ostrich Burgers and Stoney. Happiness.


Retracing our way off the Cape, we turned further east and headed out to Simons Town, the home of a National Park site that hosts a huge penguin rookery. They have a series of

Lots and lots of penguins

boardwalks up to allow people to walk above the nesting penguins. My only other penguin experience was in Tasmania where I went on a "Penguin Safari". This consisted of standing out on the cold shore in the middle of the night to watch Fairy Penguins run across the beach to their nests. You could only see the animals from a distance, lit up by the spotlights of the guides. This was a completely different experience. Our stroll along the boardwalk showed us hundreds of African Penguins engaged in all sorts of behaviors. In the span of mere minutes we observed nesting, feeding, mating and all sorts of social interactions within the crowded colony. It was absolutely fascinating.

Our time in South Africa was way too short. I opted out of going on safari, which was the choice of many of my friends and most of the students. The safaris all involved long plane flights and huge expense. I've already spent a fair bit of money on this year without salary and I've decided to

Penguins are very cool

conserve my funds. Also, if you've read my posts of the awesome experiences Jim and I had in Amboseli this past summer, I figured that I wasn't going to top that anyway. It definitely leaves me with plenty undone here in South Africa and lots of desire to come back and visit again. Now we are on to Ghana on this whirlwind tour. More to follow.

Coral Reefs and Dodo Birds

Our transit across the Indian Ocean remained peaceful. Transiting due southwest, seas remained calm and classes continued. We had not had a long ocean transit since leaving Hawaii and students and faculty alike were unaccustomed to multiple days of classes. We had grown accustomed to two days of school, three or four days of exploring a new country, back on the boat for a couple of days, and so on. Now we were looking at five or six days in a row of school work. Oh woe upon us.

Our days at sea are divided into three class periods of seventy-five minutes each before lunch and four periods in the afternoon. Following dinner there is generally a variety of academic and social functions, usually built around a 2000 (8:00 p.m.) talk in the Student Union called the "Explorer Seminar". It makes for full days, and there is always plenty to keep you distracted from preparing lectures or grading papers. On this leg, I was assigned by our Dean to give a seminar on the island of Mauritius - our next stop. My talk was a twofer, as I was paired with Louise, one of my traveling companions way back when in Kyoto. Louise, a lawyer, was slated to discuss the political, social and religious aspects of the island. My task was to present the physical side of the island - geology, biology and environmental aspects of the island. While I had never been to Mauritius, I was armed with a decent working knowledge of tropical islands, a bit of prior prep work, an excellent presentation stolen from my good friend Michel, and a deep long-term interest in the island formally inhabited by the Dodo bird, famed in song and story. As an evolutionary biologist, Mauritius is famous in my field as having once hosted the most famous extinction in the history of biology. This was one place I've been excited to visit for a very long time. The talk went well and I was primed for a short, but hopefully sweet visit.

Port Louis, Mauritius

The morning of our arrival into Port Louis, dawned cloudy with intermittent squalls. The island loomed on the horizon with several volcanic peaks thrusting out green and lush. Not surprisingly, with it's very similar geology the island reminded me strongly of Saint Lucia in the Caribbean. The island is not over built and the city of Port Louis looked quaint and a bit sleepy compared to the huge cities we had been visiting along our track.



Customs clearance went swiftly and we were soon on the dock, boarding a small bus. I had arranged for a snorkeling trip to the north end of the island for a group of ten faculty and staff and since our time was short, we were anxious to get going. After snaking our way through some morning rush hour traffic, we were quickly on a coastal road heading north. The road was in excellent repair and the buildings we passed were in excellent repair. While I can't speak for the island as a whole, the section we traveled through was quite affluent. Gone were the shacks and tumbledown buildings of India and Mayanmar. As we got out of town proper, we were soon passing through thick fields of sugarcane on both sides of the road. It was easy to feel like I had somehow been transported to Grenada or the Dominican Republic until the illusion would be shattered by the abrupt appearance of a Hindu temple in the distance. Familiar and foreign.

An hour's drive brought us to a little tourist community on the northwest corner of the island. There we were met by our two guides Potato and Poohbah. No, I am not making up those names. They had a small speedboat that comfortably held the twelve of us and we were quickly on our way across the water towards a sharp volcanic cliff island just offshore. The weather was threatening rain and we had a smattering on the ride over, but before long the clouds broke and we enjoyed bright sunshine the rest of our day. After a brief tour around the island, we picked up a mooring and got the chance to jump in the water.

On the way to the dive site

Our guides brought us to a nice little reef with a lot of healthy coral growth. I was pleased, especially after my last snorkeling expedition in Vietnam where the coral had been pretty impacted and the water quality poor. Here the water was clear and the coral looked to be in pretty good shape. Much of the coral seemed pretty young, growing on old reef that may have had some impacts in the recent past. We had heard that the island had suffered some hot water conditions in the past that had killed a bunch of coral. Things seem to be coming back in this part of the country at least. We saw a good diversity of fish although most were pretty small. I saw a couple of small lobster, some anemone and coolest of all - two Moray Eels out and foraging during the day, something I had never seen before. All in all a very nice experience.

We had lunch while tied up at the mooring. Home-made chapati and Phoenix beer produced smiles all around. The day went quickly and after another short snorkel, we had to head back to the beach. Our time in Mauritius was only one day long so we needed to be back on the bus and heading back to the Explorer pretty quick. By late afternoon we were back on board, happy but with a feeling of incompleteness. I could easily have spent a month on the island. I didn't really get to see the town and there were several very tempting peaks just screaming out to be climbed. This is a place I would very much like to return to. Of course, most of the places we've visited are places I want to return to…

We are presently back underway and headed for Capetown South Africa. We have six days there and I am greatly looking forward to getting to know the area a bit. I feel certain that we'll leave there wanting more, just like every place we've visited so far.

India and Beyond

We departed India three days ago and I am way behind in my blogging. I could offer my multitude of excuses like a Seminar I have to give in a couple of days to the ship's company, the guest lecture I'm giving in two Oceanography classes, mid-term exams and several other things spinning on my plate, but I imagine my friends and family don't want to hear me complain about during my trip around the world, so let's just move on…

I'm going to blog a bit backwards, in that I have just come below from a dinner sitting outside on Deck Six. Some of the fifth graders at Waterford want to know about food on the ship, so I'll tell you a bit about food on board. We eat cafeteria-style, with food laid out in steam trays and we just stand in line to fill our plates with whatever we want. The food is completely edible, but pretty plain. There is generally some nearly fresh vegetables of the salad variety along with some sort of cooked vegetable as well. There is nearly always pasta, rice and potatoes so you can totally get all of your starch groups if you want. Then there is generally some sort of meat dish, beef, chicken or fish. The food is pretty repetitious and often the source of complaints. However, it's something of a sea-going tradition to complain about the food. I'm mostly an eat-to-live type and the food is just fine for me. It is nice when we go ashore though for the variety and novelty of something different. It's been great that all of the food I've gotten during our shore time has been wonderful (except perhaps that Big Mac on the Great Wall….).

Students dining in the Deck 6 dining area

Sunset over the Indian Ocean

There are so many people on board, we have two dining areas on the ship. They are on Deck Six and Seven, on top of the others. I generally choose the upper of the two (called the "Garden Lounge") as it is a bit less "formal". Additionally, if you're lucky you can grab one of the ten or so tables that sit outside overlooking the stern and the ship's wake. Tonight I was able to join a group of staff and faculty on the starboard side just in time to watch the sunset. As we approach the equatorial doldrums, the winds have been nearly nonexistent and the seas have been glassy calm. We are currently heading just about due south tonight so the sun was setting beautifully over the starboard rail giving us a perfect view of an amazing tropical dusk. I've spent a few days at sea. At one point I made an informal count and just with my time at SEA, I had over 1300 days at sea. Add on to that various research cruises and the odd overnight ferry crossing or two and I've got pretty darn close to four years of my life on boats. I would put tonight's sunset in the top ten, it was that good. Most tropical sunsets are pretty quick but the cloud cover was full enough to hold the light for a long period resulting in a rich, watercolor effect on the smooth equatorial sea. It was absolutely sublime and I spent most of the meal just staring at the sky soaking in the beauty. Truly amazing.

 Our days since leaving India have been pretty full. Today was "B14" which means that we have had fourteen days of class for each course, each of which meets on either an "A" day or a "B" day - twenty-eight days total. The last day of classes is B23, so we are well past the half-way point now.

We had an amazing visit to India. We landed in the city of Cochin, in the Indian state of Kerla. The daytime temperatures were well over 95 degrees F with what felt like 110 percent humidity. Stepping off the ship was like walking into a slightly stale steam bath. By the standards of the country, Kerla is a relatively wealthy state and as such we didn't see the poverty and terrible crowding that characterizes much of the country. It was still quite crowded by the standards of much of the US. During our time in country, many of our students got the opportunity to travel up to the Taj Mahal and other areas outside of Kerla and they reported seeing the  huge crowds and destitution that still plagues much of the country. While it would have been nice to see some of the cultural sights of other sections of the country, I choose another option and signed up for a trekking trip to a region of Kerla called Munnar, an area to the east of Cochin in the Ghat mountain range of southern India.

Getting to Munnar was a grueling four and half hour bus ride through the endless urban area of western Kerla. The city never seemed to end and our bus slogged through traffic for the better part of three hours. We were one of the few large vehicles in a sea of small autos, motor bikes, bicycles and three-wheeled motorized rickshaws. Even here in the relatively affluent portion of the country, there were people everywhere and it was hard to judge where one community stopped and the next one started. We passed seemingly endless rows of shops, small high-rise residences and public buildings. Finally we began to see more rural type openings and small plots of banana, pineapple and coconut began to appear. The land began to rise as we entered the foothills of the Ghat mountains and traffic started to thin. Soon we were rising up steep switchbacks and looking out over increasing open views of the smoky, steaming lowlands we were leaving behind.

We climbed for the better part of an hour and left the tropical fruits behind. Replacing them were extensive tea fields that this part of India is famous for. Following a curry lunch at a local hotel, we continued upward and were soon surrounded by tea. Another half hour brought us to the end of the bus ride and a delightfully cool 85 degrees. I've never seen a tea plantation before so I have no basis of comparison, but I'll try to describe how the tea is grown here. The tree itself stands about three feet high and is planted in undulating rows that follow the contour up the slopes of the hillside to dizzying angles that seem nearly impossible to stand, much less cut leaves by hand. From some angles the fields seem to glide up and down like an ocean swell stretching out as far as the eye can see. The mountain slopes were sometimes completely covered and sometimes the tea ended with scrubby mountain vegetation or small trees growing above where the tea couldn't be planted. The whole thing was impossibly green and hard to get my mind around as it faded into the mountain mist.

Tea in the mist

Our bus dropped us off on the side of the road and the guide took our group of 39 walking right into the fields on a small foot path used by the workers on the plantation. We were trekking! As we progressed through the remainder of our day, the weather got progressively cloudier and eventually we were walking through a dense fog. This made the tea fields seem even stranger as I could look across the endless stretch of tea plants that were now disappearing into the fog. I was at the end of the line of students and I could hear voices and laughter, but at times I couldn't see another soul. Instead I just followed the narrow road into the thick fog, surrounded on all sides by dense thickets of tea. It was spooky and quite beautiful.

We walked for the better part of two hours and didn't see more than perhaps ten people the entire time. It seemed a bit strange to be so alone in a country that has 1.2 some-odd billion people in it. Eventually we came to small village and walked through and down a rough track to our accommodations for the night. We were slated to stay in tents on this trip, something some of the students had never done before. This was not so much a novelty for me, although having a staff of seven to cook, clean up and build a giant bonfire was a new camping experience for me. Usually I'm carrying the tent in myself and making mac and cheese or some other kind of backcountry culinary masterpiece. We were forced to have fresh crispy fry bread, steamed rice and vegetables and several different forms of curry. Somehow I managed to choke it all down.

The students loved the bonfire and many stayed up much later than I was willing to. Getting up to see the amazing sunrise across the mountain valley we were camped above made me glad that I had gotten to bed at a reasonable hour. Many of the students were pretty beat when we dragged them out of their tents for our 8:00 a.m. start. Those of us who were able to rise at an earlier hour were greeted to an amazing sunrise into a steep mountain valley that was just a cloud-filled space the evening before. We were at least 1000 feet above a green expanse with a small community barely visible in the far distance. Our guides informed us that the distant village was a popular shooting location for many Bollywood films. I could see why with the scenic vistas surrounding us.

Plenty of tea, but no hot water

Following a hearty breakfast, we tramped out of the camp, leaving most of our gear behind. We would be returning the same evening. We spent the entire day tromping through tea fields, transformed into beautiful green expanses with clear skies and beautiful sunshine. Our guides informed us that this was the highest elevation tea fields in the world, and they were everywhere. About half way through the day we came upon workers, high up in the tea fields cutting the upper leaves by hand. All the work is done by hand and the workers (mostly women) would fill huge sacks with tea leaves and then carry them down the winding gaps between the tea plants on their heads, steadying their burdens with one hand while the other stood out to keep their balance on the steep slopes. It was all very rustic and authentic-seeming, but a bit sad as we learned that these women are pretty much share croppers. They work the fields in exchange for a place to live on the plantation and a small wage. Good for the tea grower, not so good for the worker it seems.

Our day two audience

We completed our day, hiking down out of the high elevation fields into a local town called Vattavada. Along the way we encountered a small village with smiling kids and adults that seemed a bit bemused that a huge group of white people were tramping down from the tea fields through their little hamlet. The town of Vattavada wasn't much bigger, a crossroads with several small stores and repair shops. We spent a few minutes there and several students managed to find things to buy. Sometimes I think they just go around looking for shopping opportunities. We then boarded the bus and returned to a second night at camp. The following day we reversed our course and returned to the heat and traffic of Cochin.

I spent the remainder of the time in India in Cochin. We explored the shopping district with the unfortunate name of "Jew Town". Apparently six or seven people of Jewish descent live here among the Hindus, Buddhists and Christians. The term doesn't seem derogatory, but made me uncomfortable nonetheless - another cultural difference to experience I suppose. We walked a fair amount among the narrow crowded streets of the city and took rickshaw rides for amazingly low prices. A trip from the center of Cochin around the peninsula to the island where the Explorer was docked took the better part of thirty minutes. Total cost? About $2. An extra dollar tip seemed to be appreciated.

While we didn't really do anything else all that interesting, we ate some great food. As I mentioned at the start of this thing, our food can be repetitious, so we enjoyed dropping into a local place and getting a steaming plate of rice, curry and roasted vegetables. The local custom is to eat all your food with your right hand, no cutlery. Your left hand is used for other things, and it is considered very rude to touch food or hand someone anything with the left hand. It's little customs like this that keep you constantly on your toes to not accidentally insult someone. In the predominantly Buddhist countries, you had to make sure you never aimed the sole of your foot towards someone. Each place has it's own customs and practices. It's fun to try to learn them and attempt to fit in for however brief our visit may be.

We are now three days from Mauritius where we will only be able to visit for a day. I've organized a group to go snorkeling on the north side of the island and this will likely be the subject of my next blog. Until next time….

Inle Lake

Our final day in Central Myanmar was focused on an exploration of Inle Lake, a large body of water in the central highlands of this part of the country. The day started early as we pulled away from our hotel at sunrise to arrive fifteen minutes at a small pier crowded with wooden boats. I had never seen a boat designed like this before. They were wooden boats built something like a flat-bottomed dory but much narrower. Each boat was about twenty-five feet long and only four or so wide with four passenger seats and a seat in the rear for the pilot. Each had a relative large and noisy one-stroke engine with a three foot shaft rigged so that it could be tilted up to run right at the surface - obviously an engineering adaptation for running in very shallow water. The engine had no box or any other sort of cover so all the working parts were right out in the weather. The design was pretty simple and looked like it hadn't changed in eighty or ninety years. They kind of looked like they would work well in a Model A Ford. Every engine pretty much looked identical. In such a remote area, they must have limited access to spare parts and having all one design (much like the modified tractors we had seen the previous day) must be a strategy to keep things in working repair.

Our transport for the day

We piled our group into a fleet of seven boats and headed off down the channel into the lake proper. It was a cold, but gorgeous morning and as we sped across the lake we saw groups of the exact same boats without passengers. Instead, single men were using the boats to either scoop up lake vegetation or for fishing. The vegetation was piled high in bright green mounds, filling the boats. Apparently it is not for human food, but instead it is dried and sold as fertilizer on local farms. Some of the boatmen were out in open water on the lake gathering wild vegetation. Others were tending floating farms, anchored by bamboo polls driven by hand into the lake bottom and held together by nets and lines. Everything was done by hand. These boats didn't even have the "modern" convenience of a seventy-year old engine.

The fishing was equally human-powered. Each fishing boat held a conical net that was deployed alongside the boat. The fisher would then stand precariously at the bow and slap the water with his oar to drivethe fish into the net which was then hauled back onboard and dumped into the center of the boat. There was no live well or any other convenience to hold the fish. It was all incredibly labor intensive.

Inle Lake fisher

We crossed the lake and visited a couple of temples on small islands. Each temple had a small market with locals hawking hand-made clothing and small wooden carvings. Jewelry was also featured prominently and as it turned out, locally made. We learned this as we were treated to visits to several craft shops including a silversmith, a paper-making facility and wood carvers. Of course there were opportunities to buy these crafts at each place. What amazed me the most was how these folks lived out on these small towns on the lake. Each dwelling was suspended above the water's surface on stilts or stone foundations set into the shallow lake water. Sometimes, dirt had been piled up to make pathways between buildings, but often the buildings were connected by wooden bridges. It was an amazing way to live.

Home sweet home

Our last stop was the most amazing. We navigated tight channels between stilt buildings to arrive at  a place called the Inn Paw Khone silk weaving village. This was a community of forty or so woman who created silk by harvesting plant fibers, hand-spinning them into threads, dyeing the thread with dyes mixed on site and then weaving the silk fabric on large wooden looms. The entire process is done by hand with the only power involved supplying the occasional bare lightbulb above a loom. You can imagine standing in the exact same place two hundred years ago watching the exact same process. Simply incredible. The women who live and work in the village live in small rooms in buildings attached to the weaving facility via wooden foot bridges. They live their entire lives surrounded by water and never really go more than a couple of hundred feet in any one direction.

Spinning silk thread by hand

We ate lunch in a small tourist restaurant attached to the village. The fare was simple, but quite tasty. Mostly rice and vegetables in light curry sauces. Lunch was quick as we had to thread our way out of the lake-bound village, motor our way across the lake and reboard our bus. Following an hour and a half on the bus, we were back at the airport and headed back to Yangon.

It was an amazing visit and I was struck by the fact that we are probably witnessing the end of a long era for this country. With the opening up of Myanmar to western tourists, development can't be far behind. Already we were seeing evidence of western influences in Yangon with advertisements for soft drinks and other products. Apparently real estate speculation is beginning to drive up prices as local business men anticipate investment in the country. Pretty soon I think, Myanmar is going to jump from the nineteenth century right into the twenty-first. I imagine if I have the privilege of seeing this place again in ten years it will be a changed place.

As I write this, we are two days from arriving in India. The transitions are amazingly quick. We have had two days of classes with only two remaining before we are immersed in yet another culture. Coincidently, my school back in Utah is on their Spring Break and a small group of students and faculty are visiting India. It would be amazing to see them, but while we will be in India at the same time, we will literally be a subcontinent apart. I hope their experience will be as amazing as what I've already experienced. We'll be in India for nearly a week, so I won't be posting again for a bit. Thanks for reading my ramblings!

Trekking to the Monastary

Our second day in Myanmar started early with a bus ride. Along the way we stopped at a Buddhist temple with a hundred-year old giant statue of a reclining Buddha. I was consistently amazed at these temples we would visit. Everything is so over-the-top. Bright colors, huge statues and neon lights are all featured in a display that seems half reverent and half Disney. Tourists with cameras are welcome alongside devout worshipers kneeling in front of shrines without any sort of nasty looks or really any sort of apparent surprise. I try to imagine a bus-load of Japanese tourists piling into a parish church back in Pennsylvania and just snapping away while Mass was going on. It just seems inconceivable.

Following our temple visit we bussed off to the airport for our trip to central Myanmar and our trekking trip. We had a group of thirty-four, mostly students and five faculty/staff from the ship. We breezed through security which was nothing like a US airport and eventually (after a nearly two-hour flight delay) boarded a twin-engine turbo prop plane that was pretty much filled with our group. An hour's flight brought us to regional airport that was pretty much set in the middle of fields of brown cut vegetation and scrubby trees. We still had a two and a half hour bus trip along bumpy partially-paved single track roads to get to our destination. Along most of the way our bus took up pretty much the entire road causing local traffic to have to find a wide spot in the dirt to pull off and allow us to pass. If the bus ever got going faster than forty miles an hour I would be surprised.

We steadily gained elevation and flat fields of cut grain began to be replaced with tilted fields of tea bushes and occasional flat areas that were being cultivated by flooding trenches alongside rows of plants and literally scooping and pouring water onto the plants. Everything was being done by hand, irrigation, weeding and turning over soil. In several places we observed fields burning to get ready for the next season of planting. Except for the occasional tractor bumping past us along the road, I saw very little evidence that the farming practices have changed here in the last thousand years.

A road-side pagoda along our hike

We finally arrived at a small restaurant in the town of Kalaw. From there we transferred from the bus to open bed trucks that held about ten people in the back and were driven up the side of a winding mountain road until it became so narrow that the trucks could not proceed. From here we would walk, and for the next five hours that's what we did. Our "trek" was not a trail, but instead it was the local road. Roads here in the hills above the rim of the Shan Plateau are not for cars or trucks. All of the traffic is by foot, human or bovine, with the very occasional motorbike. We saw perhaps five or six over the two days we were there and several small herds of cattle which are used for work, not meat or dairy production. Every person we passed on the road was carrying something: firewood, farm implements or long bamboo poles they had cut for construction purposes. It was quickly clear that these folks don't see a group of thirty-some-odd white people walking down their road every day. Each person we passed would look at us with completely serious wide-eyed stares that quickly turned to bright smiles as soon as we would greet them with a poorly pronounced (and spelled I imagine) "Ming-la-ba", the local greeting. The people were incredibly friendly and it was clear that they were curious about us. Many would stop to speak to our guide who had to explain over and over who we were and why we were there.

Our flight delay meant that we were still trekking at sunset and indeed into the dark. Fortunately the trail was wide and easy to follow as I was one of only three of our group to bring a headlamp on our overnight trekking trip. A couple of the students complained that no one "told" them to bring a flashlight on an overnight trekking trip to a rural part of a developing country. Fortunately we only had a little less than an hour of darkness before we came up a small rise to the compound of the Hti Thane Monastery, our abode for the night.

While the group was milling about, our guide greeted the head monk, our host for the night. I went forward and asked the guide to thank him for us and I got to shake his hand. In Myanmar, they don't really shake hands so really he just grabbed my hand and held it for about thirty seconds while the guide translated his welcome to me. It was kind of a cool cross-cultural experience. Later we had some food brought in via motorbikes by our guides. After dinner we were treated to a local music experience consisting of six guys on local instruments and ten or twelve young girls dancing in traditional dress. The students really enjoyed interacting with all the kids and we ended up staying out in the increasingly cold air till nearly ten p.m. when eventually the kids were called back by their parents.

At that point, it was dark and cold and we were in a place that had a single small lightbulb suspended by a thin wire above the one-room monastery. Like century's past, the sun was down and it was time for bed. "Bed" was a thin cotton mat on a hard wood floor and a couple of thin blankets. No problem for me, but a couple of the students were used to the high-class accommodations we had been enjoying on previous port calls and were a bit put out. Since this is what the monks do every night, not just one, it was definitely a suck it up and deal situation. The hardest part for me was that we hadn't been warned that we were going to be at significant elevation and it was COLD. The cold doesn't usually bother me, but the temperature went well below 45 degrees F and just about everyone had a rough night trying to keep warm. We all survived the night intact and enjoyed a nice breakfast of fried rice with an egg on top. That may be my new standard breakfast - beats the heck out of corn flakes!

After wishing the monks goodbye, we began our trek back. We were returning back to the same spot we started, but taking a circular route which allowed us to see different portions of the area. This route took us past numerous dwellings with kids hanging out everywhere. Like the day before, we would get long serious stares until we smiled and gave a greeting. We would get the same greeting back with big happy smiles.

Just a few of our new friends we met along the way

Often the kids would reply and then whisper and laugh among themselves - doubtlessly laughing at our atrocious accents. We again saw mostly people on foot with the very occasional motorbike. As we got lower we began to see these strange hybrid vehicles that looked like a small lawnmower engine attached to a flatbed truck. The engines looked like they were only two cylinders, and they chugged along pretty slowly. They weren't being used in the small fields, but seemed to be only used to haul people and light cargo up and down the narrow dirt road. Every so often, you would see houses with a single black power line leading up to it to power electric lights. Cooking was done entirely by open pit fires and a lot of effort seemed to go into chopping and hauling firewood.

The hike was very pleasant and we made good progress; getting back down in much less time than it had taken us to climb up. We returned to our starting point, a local restaurant, with plenty of time to enjoy a nice lunch of vegetables and chicken curry. We then rebounded our bus and headed down to a hotel adjacent to Inle Lake, our destination for the following day.

The bus ride was well over two hours taking us from the highlands into the lower, richer areas. Tea fields turned into rice paddies and the buildings grew larger and in better repair. We got to our hotel and had the chance to clean up and explore a bit before heading out to dinner at a local Italian place. Yes, Italian. We enjoyed the traditional spaghetti with meat sauce that Myanmar is so famous for. The food was fine, although I would have preferred a more local fare. The students seemed to really enjoy it though.

When I get the chance to post next, I'll describe our amazing day on the Lake….

Myanmar

If you know anything about Myanmar (formally Burma, formally Japanese territory, formally Rangoon), you know that it's had a rough history between the population and who was in charge. It's only been a few years since Myanmar came out from under a rather nasty military dictatorship that, among other things, kept it's economy and culture from growing at all. Consequently they are still in the very early stages of getting used to hosting foreign visitors. This was the one country that I really hoped to get a glimpse of culture relatively untouched by Hollywood and the global culture. I was not disappointed.

We arrived to our second band. This one, not a brass marching band but instead a group of local musicians with a traditional dancer performing minor acrobats as the ship slid alongside the rough concrete pier next to a small cargo ship. There was no port facility of any kind and as it turned out, we were an hour's bus ride from the city of Yangon. The river we had motored up was not deep enough to accommodate the M/V Explorer, so this was as close to the city as we could get. From here you had to take a bus.

We weren't cleared through Customs until nearly 1600 and even though I was slated to get up early in the morning to go to the airport for a trekking trip, I wanted a chance to see the city. So I piled onto one of the three waiting busses and headed off to town with a small group of faculty and staff. The ride in was very rural, passing brown fields that look to have been recently harvested. We were in the dry season, and things were very brown and dusty. All along the road we saw bicycles and small motorbikes along with a few cars. The numbers of cars steadily increased as we neared the city. Off in the distance and sometimes right along the road we saw numerous bright gold-colored pagodas of Buddhist temples. The country is something like 80% Buddhist and the spires, towers and statues of the Buddha became a common sight throughout our time in country.

We were dropped off at the City Hall, an old colonial building from the time the British ruled the country. Directly across from this very stodgy British building was a giant pagoda, painted white with a bright gold minaret. There were people on foot everywhere and the city was alive with folks finishing their work day. We wandered away from the center block and walked along the tight narrow streets soaking in the culture. Shops were busy and street vendors selling cooked food crouched on the sidewalks along the busy streets. The city was full of life and the long stares we got as we passed by was a bit of a testament to the fact that they don't see a lot of white faces, even in the "big city".

We eventually found our way to a local restaurant where a couple of the waiters had about thirty English words along with a menu that had some English as well. Two of our group, Ariana and Olivia took over the menus and quickly the beer and food began flowing. The food was quite good, kind of like Vietnamese food but not quite so spicy. We had fried rice with bits of barely identifiable seafood, a chicken curry dish and several things with noodles and vegetables that all looked similar but tasted different from each other. We spent a good hour and a half eating and passing dishes back and forth so that everyone could try everything. By the time the evening was over I had at least three beverages and a very full tummy from a lot of great food. The bill? About five bucks. Hard to beat.

Following dinner, four of us found a taxi and headed up to the Shwe Dagone temple outside of the city. This is a large Buddhist temple which has been built, added on to, and rebuilt for I don't know how many centuries. We arrived at the temple, took off our shoes and took a four-story elevator to arrive at the top of the facility. At this point it was well full-dark and the temple was lit by bright spotlights allowing the main pagoda to be seen from all over the city.

It's difficult for me to put into words what this place is like. I grew up in the Catholic church which has it's fair share of pomp and circumstance. Walking through a large cathedral can be an impressive, awesome experience. High Mass, with it's swinging incense, pounding organ music and brightly colored stained glass is a feast for the senses. The Catholics have nothing on the Buddhists. This place is like a Mardi Gras parade on acid. Spotlights and street lamps lit thousands of Buddha statues sitting among ornate towers, temples and spires. Spinning and whirling neon lights illuminated the back of statue heads while blinking christmas lights strobed out of sequence with each other from multiple rooftops. There were people everywhere, kneeling in front of statues, reading aloud from scriptures, and pouring water over the heads of statues that represented days of the week in which the person was born. Lines of candles and burning incense

Full Moon over the Shwe Dagon pagoda

surrounded the entire walkway around the central, twenty-story high pagoda. We walked around the giant pagoda (clockwise, always clockwise) and gawked at the spectacle of the place. It was amazing. I was lucky enough to be with a Professor of religion, a Professor of Buddhism and a Professor of Art History so the entire visit was one long series of me asking "what is that?" and getting the full history and meaning of each little detail. I think I earned something like three college credits before the evening was out.

We stayed until they began ringing the time-to-go bell at 10 p.m. We then made our way back to our shoes which took some doing - this place is a maze. and got back outside to find a taxi. We reversed our course and got back to the City Hall to catch our hour-long bus back to the ship. I was set to leave first thing in the morning for a trekking trip in the north part of the country. This trip will be the subject of my next post. We're back at sea now and it's mid-term time so I'll continue to post our Myanmar adventures as time allows. Hard to believe that we are at the half-way point already! Till next time…